Milkvetch
by Atoms and Elements
Summary: A love story between a girl struggling with being a deerthing and a boy trying to keep from being a ghost. We don't need each other to survive but perhaps it will lessen the struggle. ItaSaku, AU/AH.


_**A/N: **_**I returned, I think, a year or so later. Please don't expect too much of me, I'm still rather incompetent and I don't even know if I'll ever finish my other stories! Particularly **_**Paragon**_**, if you've followed me for that story. I'll do my best though, I promise.**

/...\

_Chapter One_

**Third Person POV:**

"I'm sorry, but the six-thirty class is full," the receptionist said apologetically, "if you wait for another hour, though, we can reserve you a spot in the next class?" Her fingers waited expectantly over the keyboard, a red eyebrow quirked upwards.

The pink-haired girl shifted uncomfortably where she stood, an arm curling protectively around her midsection and yoga mat. She'd told herself earlier that she would wind up regretting this sudden impulse to interact with other people, particularly after the events of the week previous, but she just wasn't the type to give up before she'd even really started. Regardless, the smell and temperature of the room were a suffocating combination. Beads of sweat were already building up under the curl of her thin bangs.

She nodded once. "That'd be great, thank you," she replied, doing her best—and failing—to keep her voice from quivering. The receptionist smiled widely, amicability written all over her dimpled face, and typed her name into the schedule. The petite pinkette took the liberty to glance around the room, nostrils still flaring from the scent of burning incense, a smell that while not exactly pungent was still heavy on her overdeveloped sense of smell.

What she'd first mistaken for a waiting room was, in fact, not at all one. She stood in front of a long desk which two receptionists with straight-bang and curly-bun haircuts sat behind, sitting cross-legged on cushioned stools. To her right was a small alcove meant for coats and shoes so that the customers could proceed to the changing room barefoot. The rest of the room split off into various changing rooms and yoga studios, each with a painted cream door. Potted plants lined the walls on all sides.

"What'd you say your name was again?"

The woman's head snapped back to the redheaded receptionist. "Oh, um, Haruno Sakura."

Having been reassured that her spot in the next class was secured, Sakura spun around and stumbled out the studio door as fast as her fleshy human legs would allow her. Because of such appendages, she opted for taking the elevator down rather than the stairs. She had an hour before the next class and there was a Starbucks across the street which could satisfy her caffeine craving—the one human indulgence she allowed herself to have aside from painted nails and lips.

An hour would not pass by quickly with her being so jittery—not that the coffee would do much to change that—, so Sakura settled into a cozy chair situated in the furthermost corner, placing her yoga mat and gym bag off to the side. The coffee scorched her throat but soothed the bubbling acid in her stomach, and she wondered briefly whether this was universal for all humans. Others seemed to be equally enjoying their own coffee.

The ambient music that filled the room seemed to mellow out the crowd of bright eyed, fidgeting coffee enthusiasts waiting in line. Sakura, on the other hand, found her lips skewed up into something unpleasant, eyebrows tightly drawn together. There wasn't anything wrong with it by any means, she assured the Starbucks employees mentally and hoped not to offend them, her ears were simply more adjusted to chickadee calls and owl coos. As it was, a shiver worked its way up her spine when the music showed no sign of ending.

She prided herself as being an autodidact and took every opportunity to learn as much as possible from the people around her. Viridian eyes scanned the café, meticulously picking apart every individual within the vicinity, craving to analyze whatever she could concerning their comportment and habitudes. A few other yogis settled themselves into the nooks and crannies, energizing themselves up for the night, cheerful chatter exhaled from their lungs. A mother sitting beside her two sons on one of the couches rubbed at her eyebags, brushing off their incessant questions with withering glares. Two teenage girls sat across from each other and held hands under the table, smiling shyly at one another with rose-tinted cheeks. Sakura kept to herself but imagined a hundred different worlds where a single conversation with one of the many would change her life indelibly.

Her confidence bloomed then wilted all in one moment, fingers unconsciously reaching up to lightly graze the crown of her head. A sigh of relief passed her lips upon finding nothing but strands of pink hair. She took another sip before checking her watch and realizing that it was five past seven. Dumping the rest of her coffee in the trash, Sakura bolted to the studio through the rain that had just begun to fall.

"Right on time," the receptionist congratulated her with a thumbs up. The pink-haired wannabe human blushed prettily.

"A first," she joked back lightly.

The other continued to grin, something which Sakura attempted to replicate but stopped upon feeling her stomach flip over. A sizable amount of her remained unused to such familiarity from any creature with less than four legs. Without letting the atmosphere become too tense, something she'd learned at an earlier occasion, Sakura moved to kick her shoes off to the right. Her toes curled at the feeling of the damp linoleum. Perhaps they'd recently cleaned, she thought, it didn't feel much like sweat but neither rain tracked in from outside. The changing room floors felt the same, but Sakura tried not to get so caught up in the thought as she took her clothes with her to one of the tiny bathrooms at the back of the room. Despite the fact that many of the other women changed without care around each other, confident in each other's maturity, Sakura felt her heartbeat speed up at the idea of other eyes on her.

Understandably, she found herself having a hard time becoming accustomed to these new experiences and frequently found herself trembling and curled up on her bed in tears.

Her apprehension had only gotten worse upon walking into the heated studio. A million worries lodged themselves into her thoughts and told her that the best scenario involved her leaving for home and crying under her comforters. More people filed in after her though, and Sakura agreed that it would be worse to run out now; the embarrassment from such a thing would probably kill her in a far more gruesome way. In spite of her own thoughts of reassurance, her cheeks flushed two shades darker as she was still unused to wearing such tiny shorts out in public, even if they were necessary in this heat. She usually wouldn't have been so modest considering her years of living in the forest had consisted of her walking around nude more often than not, but from what she'd observed from magazines and television shows, humans were much more mindful of such things. Sakura wondered what the others around her would think.

Their unperturbed countenances suggested that perhaps they did not think of such things, some other women clad in similar garments. Milky eyes drifted lackadaisically over one another. Allowing herself to relax slightly, Sakura quickly found a place to unroll her mat at the front of the room by the mirror-covered wall. Her feet patted almost inaudibly against the floor as she rolled out her mat, covered it with a thin towel, and placed her water bottle at the front of it. The pinkette discretely glanced around the room to see what others were doing then quietly found her way into the same lying down position as everyone else.

In those moments, her heartbeat became more apparent, the only sound pulsing past her eardrums. However, the idea of remaining so still disturbed her as much as the idea of anything else. Other heartbeats crept past her sensitive eardrums as well. In another reality, she comforted herself with the knowledge that she could always count herself as the most sensitive person in the room. In this one, horrific thoughts as to whether others could hear her unnaturally fast heartbeat terrified her into a state of paralysis.

_Oh, they'll hear me. They'll hear me for sure and turn their heads away in disgust—force me into my natural shape and break my legs and skin my pelt. I can't cry, oh god, I don't want to cry, please don't look at me, please don't hear me, I don't want to be here, I should've stayed home. I'm such an idiot—_

Her thoughts were mercilessly cut off. "Hello everyone, thank you all for coming and bringing your energy with you tonight," a soft-voiced woman spoke after closing the door to the studio behind her, "if we haven't practiced together before, my name is Tenten. During this sixty minute moksha yoga practice, please take the time to relieve yourself of any troubling thoughts or memories..."

She spoke at length for a few more seconds. Tenten's words gave Sakura something to mentally latch onto, allowing her body to loosen up. Of course there was no reason for her to grow so panicked so quickly; she knew for a fact that there wasn't a single other person possessing eardrums as finely tuned as her own. Feeling a little more comfortable in her own skin, Sakura felt her lips fall slack and eyelids slide shut. The scent of incense was less present in this room as opposed to the foyer; instead Sakura inhaled the smell of sweat and laundry detergent. Perhaps the real challenge would not be loosening up but decathecting from her natural form in order to remain as a wallflower.

"Come into child's pose for a few breaths," Tenten encouraged the class warmly, "then please plant your hands at the front of your mat and walk or jump up to them." Sakura followed the rhythm of her breath, letting it fall in sync with everyone else's.

Sakura raised her eyes to the mirror and felt her breath catch.

She hadn't realized before but in her haste to get settled in and locked away inside of herself, Sakura had accidentally placed her mat in the very centre of the room. It was ineluctable that all eyes would somehow find their way to her then. She hadn't counted on this, nearly lost her breath when two blue orbs pressed into the reflection of hers. They were avoidable however and Sakura filled her mind with mantras of reassuring while closing her eyes. Despite her overwhelming feelings of paranoia, logically no one else could possibly be privy to her tightly kept secret. There would be no witch-hunt, no congealed heart. With that in mind, the pink-haired girl opened her eyes to catch her reflection once again.

A pair of dark eyes found hers, left an imprint the size of the sun on her heart. Despite the chunk now missing and voices now out of earshot, she held her ground, curled toes into the soft fabric underneath her and pressed blunt fingernails into her palms. Later she would be pleased to find crescent moon imprints; now she lost a part of her humanity in a pair of coal-eaten eyes. A hollow moon would drag her in before she allowed this to be what unravelled her innards.

Sakura was always the type to find a death in affection, no matter how superficial. For the millionth time, she wondered if this one would drag her all the way.

_Don't look at me with those eyes_, her thoughts left footprints on the ceiling overhead with full intention to locate the sun and blend into its scintillations, _I'll fall in love with you and you will never be the same._

**·**

**·**

**·**

We speak thinking others will pay heed to our words or shower us with praise. At a young age, Sakura recognized this to be false in the face of her mother and father's sudden horror at the frightening appearance of her lower half. Their love for her was a star fleeting glance, snuffing out in the wake of her accidental birth. Before taking her first breath, Sakura wondered whether they'd ever loved her beyond an idea, beyond a notion of what-could-be. Not that she would blame them if such turned out to have merit. In her early years, a common train of thought was one of parents and their conditional love for their children—with the help of the other woodland animals, she studied the subject thoroughly and never came to any satisfactory conclusion.

"I love my mommy and daddy," the newly born would whisper into the sky, waking up to find herself nestled in the tall grass of a faraway meadow. With the tender heart of a newborn fawn, she could not muster up the strength to resent them for her abandonment.

She often thought up dreamscapes where she could remain a flowerchild nestled in her mother's arms; touch the honey-nectar reality of loving parents. These dreams leant her legs to stand on when the four under her found themselves aquiver. In them, Sakura often imagined what kisses might be like; whether they might feel the same as other deer butting their noses against her odd, naked chest or if they they'd be no different than wasp stings. Those thoughts were beautiful and cruel, broke her in ways she never thought one could break, not surrounded by charming compatriots.

In a tragic turn of events, Sakura found at an early age that she was cursed to fall in love with whatever coincided with the sun for her. The child of a generation of emotionally distanced parents and a birth mishap, she could not help being born a deer-thing with an all too big heart. On a sunny afternoon in a small town crossed off modern maps, a man and a woman of a frighteningly young age found themselves the parents of a baby girl with deer legs. Unable to survive with the knowledge, Sakura became a feral child of the most natural kind.

A youngling in the rough, a fawnling at heart, Sakura allowed her heart to realize that this world was a sun-dipped rose—we find ourselves mesmerized and blindly grope for thorns.

\.../

_**A/N:**_** I hope you all enjoyed the first chapter! I have an infatuation with deergirls and ghostboys, so this is my creative brainchild of the two. I'm still a little irked with myself for posting this. Maybe I'll fall in love with it soon.  
This will be a love story and a commentary on surviving with emotional incapacities and how the two are not mutually inclusive. **

**-Atom-**


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